


Macrocosm

by Sub_Rosa



Category: Heaven Will Be Mine (Visual Novel)
Genre: An Offering From The Depths Of My Hard Drive In Trying Times, Circuitous Variations On A Theme, Cradle’s Graces Ending, F/F, Giant Robots, High-Concept Science Fantasy, Highly Advanced Psychophysics 101 For Astronauts, Mecha, Outer Space, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Shameless Smut, Size Difference, Telepathic Sex, Tenderness, That’s Not How Gravity Works, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:41:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24820258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sub_Rosa/pseuds/Sub_Rosa
Summary: When Luna-Terra wants to learn to feel gravity the way that her girlfriends do, Pluto and the Krun Macula teach her a lesson she’ll never forget.
Relationships: Background Luna-Terra/Pluto/Saturn, Luna-Terra/Pluto (Heaven Will Be Mine)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	Macrocosm

Luna-Terra sits enclosed in the cockpit of the Krun Macula, and Pluto with her.

Luna-Terra has been inside of other ship-selves more times than she can count, both to see the girls inside and to see the machinery surrounding them. She’s no stranger to the foreign sensibilities of other souls, or to the foreign chariots they ride, and how could she be? She never learned to know herself until long after she had learned to know others.

None of this makes Luna-Terra any less nervous.

Luna-Terra is anxious like this is her first time in any machine whatsoever, her first time ever in outer space. She’s wrought like a tuning fork at Pluto’s back, more felt and heard in her disquiet than seen.

Pluto feels and hears that disquiet, all the understated metal and sharp tones. Pluto feels and hears a lot of things.

She could take Luna-Terra even further aside to say sweet nothings, to remind her that she doesn’t have to do this, but Luna-Terra would disagree, because this is her own idea to begin with. It’s a conversation they’ve already had, preparing for this sojourn, and it’s not one that would be reassuring to revisit.

But Pluto can be reassuring in a lot of different ways.

“You can touch me, you know,” she says, bright and sincere and more than a little self-satisfied. Luna-Terra tries to roll her eyes but she can’t keep herself from smirking instead. (Coming from her it’s like fits of laughter.)

“I’m not so sure it would notice,” Luna-Terra says. “Even if you would.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Watch,” Luna-Terra says, her eyes on Pluto, and Pluto watches herself.

Pluto holds the Krun Macula in her hands, dancing effortlessly across console, dashboard and controls. She moves like an artist. She runs her fingers along buttons, switches and sliders like a painter.

It’s a far sight from what Luna-Terra does with the Mare Crisium: every motion brutal and straightforward, and beautiful for it, an exercise in the economy of motion.

“You never use the same control the same way twice,” Luna-Terra says. “Not that I can see. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not something that I can do.”

“Don’t be silly!” Pluto laughs. “You don’t know what you can do before you try, and we haven’t even started yet!”

Luna-Terra smiles because Pluto’s laugh is infectious, but she doesn’t acquiesce. She _could_ pilot the Krun Macula, but anyone “can” do anything. It’s the “will” that’s the hard part, and she isn’t actually out here to learn how to fly Pluto’s ship-self.

Luna-Terra is out here because she’s a brilliant genius in a way that’s functionally indistinguishable from absolute stupidity, and stupidity is a liability, especially at a time like this. She can fight and fuck, she can lay her enemies low and lay her enemies, but she’s flying blind in a star system where everyone and their mother can apparently see and feel and know in ways that she can’t. _Please, Pluto, I need to learn._

Saturn thinks that Luna-Terra is being even more of an idiot than normal, because who cares if she’s not a sublime space psychic who can feel the weight of an angel dancing on the head of a pin? She’s still the hottest person in space in a way that no-one else can be, and the most lethal person in space in a way that no-one else ever will be, and also, actively trying to learn tidal sensitivity is a great way to learn nothing and to completely destroy yourself. _but u already know that, LT! youre just a glutton for punishment!_

Pluto thinks that Luna-Terra is being dumb, but she’s cute when she gets like this, all stubborn and bullheaded and pleading! And how can Pluto say no to a face like that? It’s dangerous to try and learn to feel the pull of gravity instead of just learning, but only because every teacher to date has been an authority all too heavy to bear and then too powerless to even put their wayward students back together.

Pluto is better than that, if only because she’s only human.

“Sorry,” Luna-Terra says. “I’m not saying what I mean.”

“You don’t _want_ to pilot the Krun Macula,” Pluto replies. “I know. I understand. But I’m still proud of you already! One look at me in here and you already know I’m making everything up as I go along! You’re not as hopeless as you say you are.”

“That’s just piloting,” Luna-Terra says. “That’s easy to understand. Everything else is so much harder.”

Luna-Terra doesn’t want to pilot the Krun Macula, and it’s not just because the thing is terrifying from the outside, or because the thing isn’t hers. She doesn’t want to pilot the Krun Macula because the thing is terribly _lonely_.

Nix commissioned the martyr-machine to be limitless, to encompass all possibilities and necessities, to hold two worlds in two hands, but there’s still only room for one throne, one figurehead, one center, one pilot. There’s only one goddamn chair in the entire chassis, and it unquestionably belongs to Pluto.

But in the end, if there’s anything that space girls are good at, it’s making things work and making room for more, right? In optimism, they just don’t know how to do anything else — and in cynicism, well, Luna-Terra doesn’t have enough of an ass to tip the two of them over the maximum seating anyways. So Luna-Terra takes the cockpit like she never does, like a guest of honor, and Pluto sits in Luna-Terra’s lap, nestled against her even as she flies the Krun Macula to the edge of the world, the real power in this throne.

Pluto reaches out to trace a perfect circle upon a touch-screen, and Luna-Terra adjusts her hold on the other girl as if to give Pluto more room to move. It’s a symbolic gesture, because Pluto clearly isn’t even really using the controls! She’s piloting the Krun Macula for no other reason than Because She Says So.

No, Luna-Terra is actually taking such care with Pluto because she likes all the ways their bodies fit together, piece by piece; she likes the way their bodies fit together now, hooking her chin over Pluto’s shoulder and watching her do what she loves, this beautiful bloodless carnage.

The truth is, Luna-Terra doesn’t want to pilot the Krun Macula because the thing is terrifying from the inside, too.

Holographic screens open up before the two of them in the cockpit, sensor feeds like hyperdiamond windows directly into outer space, and the view is a careful empyrean chaos, the bow-shock of the Krun Macula as she tears a storm through space-time. She scatters the light and heat of her passage into delicate coiling ribbons, reducing the evidence of her path to an inchoate spray.

The Krun Macula veers and zig-zags and accelerates thousands of times harder than _g_ , and Luna-Terra feels nothing. Not even the slightest tug of inertia, the gravity that comes of conditioned existence.

Luna-Terra feels nothing but Pluto’s warm body in her arms.

It’s not just that Luna-Terra is an idiot who doesn’t know or feel the kiss of gravity: no, Luna-Terra is a genius, too, and she knows the experience of piloting a ship-self like a line of old lovers.

Luna-Terra knows what it feels like to hit forty thousand kilometers per hour from a standing start, and she’s seen the Krun Macula soar across starry skies, but now the Krun Macula blazes past Poseidon with Luna-Terra in the cockpit, and Luna-Terra feels nothing, not a whisper of acceleration or deceleration.

Pluto commands the Krun Macula to move, but the Krun Macula might as well be standing still and commanding the world to move around _her_. Pluto sits in Luna-Terra’s lap, but Luna-Terra is just the cushion between her and her unadorned throne at the center of the universe.

The sheer scope of the Krun Macula’s untouchability — the scope of Luna-Terra’s ineptitude — is devastatingly humbling. They are above the world, and if Luna-Terra ever flew this high, she knows she would be numb and senseless for fear of falling.

Luna-Terra wonders at Pluto that she can do this at all, but she also remembers laying with her among the clouds, holding hands without looking. _Go so you can save me if I mess it up, Luna-T — go back down to the ground so you can catch me if I fall._

_And I’ll stay here so I can lift you back up if you fall, too!_

That feels natural, at least, as simple as breathing. It feels right.

The Krun Macula hurtles beyond the orbit of Uranus, and if ever they have breached the vault of Heaven, they do it again now, ascending ever further into the profound quiet and dark of outer space.

“Luna-T,” Pluto says. “You’re too proud of what you can do to really believe that piloting is easy.”

Is Luna-Terra really proud? She supposes that she is, which narrowly saves her from saying something truly stupid and crashing and burning upon the shores of total self-ownage. As if she would ever make a good owner for anybody, let alone herself!

Pluto laughs, and Luna-Terra realizes that she’s talking out loud again, or that Pluto is reading her again, and that she can’t tell the difference.

She can’t tell the difference _yet_ , Pluto says, or maybe Luna-Terra is just imagining her say it.

“It is hard,” Luna-Terra finally says. “It’s so hard it amazes me every day that anyone can do it at all. But it’s still the easiest thing I’ve ever done, because it gets easier.”

“How so?” Pluto asks.

“Any object in motion can stay in motion,” Luna-Terra says. “That’s all. You just have to get up to speed.”

The Krun Macula begins to slow, approaching distant Hades in asymptote and falling into the proper frame of reference. Luna-Terra still feels nothing from their acceleration, but her stomach spins like a top anyways.

Her stomach churns, but she imagines herself in the steel image of the Mare Crisium, building gimbals around her whirling fear until it stands as a tall and certain gyroscope.

She can do this. If nothing else, she can’t _not_ do this.

“...are you alright, Pluto?”

“Hm?” Pluto turns in Luna-Terra’s lap to face her. “I should be asking _you_ that, you know!”

“I’m only asking you because you’re not saying yes.”

Pluto blinks with her eyes wide open, and then she smiles.

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Always.”

“I’m nervous, too,” Pluto says.

The fact of Pluto’s vulnerability is something that everyone already knows but no-one lingers on; something that Pluto will never say out loud, if only because everyone already knows without ever being told. But it’s not unusual for her to say it now. She and Luna-Terra have come this far exactly because it’s a way to step even further outside of their normal abnormal.

If Pluto cried, here, and told Luna-Terra again how hard it is to be an axis of the world, well, who would know? Who would be there to be cruel to them in their moment, or thoughtless, or just hurtful?

No-one at all, and that itself is reassuring.

“I know,” Luna-Terra says. She’s clumsy like a woman too late to learn how to be there for people, and close and caring like a woman who is, and Pluto leans in closer.

Pluto wonders if they really even need to go further for Luna-Terra to understand, but she also doubts that stopping now would do anything good. Some kinds of power are always already mastered and exercised in excess before they’re even remotely understood.

So she leans over to the left in her seat, pulling open a chamber that definitely isn’t a glove compartment and pulling out a plasticized bubble. Luna-Terra takes it from her with gloved hands.

“Are we here, then?” Luna-Terra asks, far from understanding the Krun Macula’s holo-screens and readouts.

“Yeah.” This far from everything else, there doesn’t seem to be much more to say. Just: “Are you ready?”

“Give me some credit here,” Luna-Terra says. Her hair is already pulled back and her earpiece is in, so she sockets the helmet around her head, joining it to the collar of her skinsuit with a complicated twisting motion. “I don’t need to be ready.”

“Hmmm,” Pluto says. “Okay! There’s just one more thing we need to do before _I’m_ ready!”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm!” Pluto tries to look serious, but she can’t stop herself from smiling. “You’ve gotta come here and give me a kiss!”

“...I just put this on, Pluto.”

Pluto giggles, closing her eyes and leaning in to give the bubble of Luna-Terra’s helmet a sloppy smooch. She leaves almost-imperceptible motes of dark lipstick behind when she pulls away.

When she opens her eyes again, Luna-Terra already meets her gaze and regards her fondly.

“Okay,” Pluto says. “I’m ready now!”

“Huh,” Luna-Terra says. “I think I’m ready, too.”

So Pluto gives her one last squeeze, and then she gets up to let her go.

Pluto retakes her throne for herself while Luna-Terra is still light and antsy on her feet, and then she reaches out to press a button on her dashboard. Any button will do; it doesn’t really matter.

The cockpit of the Krun Macula opens cleanly, without airlock or filters, and the breath is torn from her lungs.

For a moment, even in the throes of the cataclysmic, explosive decompression, Luna-Terra still feels nothing. She is yet still in the center of the world, in the throne of the Krun Macula, and the world will move around _her_ , just as it does for Pluto, sitting serene and unruffled in the center of a chaos which scarcely ruffles her hair.

Then the moment passes, and Luna-Terra gathers speed. She’s lifting up, pulling away, hurled forth and falling into the world beyond Hades.

* * *

The thing is, it’s all too easy to say that Luna-Terra is an idiot who doesn’t know how to read between the lines or read a room.

But it’s much harder for Luna-Terra herself to say that she doesn’t know.

It certainly wasn’t an _ignorance_ of the story that tortured Luna-Terra long ago on Earth, not when Luna-Terra was all too aware of the story _of_ Earth.

Her awareness was exactly the problem, in fact.

Luna-Terra was never _not_ aware of the magnitude all about her: that simple, absolute, authoritarian gravity which demanded a single story and nothing more. The singular, totalizing story of ‘Earth’ for which she could write eighty honest years of love and loss and life if she tried and still go forever unread in her own words.

In the face of that devastation which could erase her before she even knew she was mounting an opposition or mourning her loss, she never even thought or imagined to look for that particular spark of creativity that burned in everyone else, the self that wrote itself for the sake of itself, for no reason other than because it wanted to.

So she suffocated and died for years under the terrible weight of herself, that person who became Luna-Terra, or that person who Luna-Terra never was; the person Luna-Terra grew up to be when the gravity of Earth couldn’t allow her to become anyone else, or the person she grew up to be when the story of Earth never spared the time to tell her that she _could_ be anyone else.

If ever on Earth she saw the stars, they were nothing to her but white-thread knots in the impassable velvet dome of the sky. When she left Earth for the first time, she didn’t even believe that she could do it at all.

There are a lot of things that Luna-Terra doesn’t believe she can do until she’s already succeeded. There are a lot of things that she still doesn’t believe she can do, even as she does them with her eyes closed shut and both hands tied behind her back.

Saturn thinks it’s hilarious — and kind of fucked up! Pluto thinks it’s cute, but it makes her unbearably sad, too.

But as for leaving Earth, well, it changed Luna-Terra’s life.

No: leaving Earth gave Luna-Terra a life to begin with at all. Even from her very first moments as a human being, the worlds beyond the sky were kinder to her than the world below. They were places where she could write a new story and be read in her own words. Places to be known as herself and to come to know herself.

But even so, mere freedom from the weight of humanity could never un-teach the lessons that humanity had already taught her. Freedom from the weight of humanity couldn’t change the person she had already learned to be: absolutely anyone and anything but dead in a ditch as a disposable monster of the week, always and already dead inside.

Even in space, the stars were only flecks of paint behind industrial aluminum-glass windows. They were only pixels on monitors.

So Luna-Terra wrote love and loss and life with the adults who expected the world from her, and wherever her story had to intersect with theirs, she still couldn’t help but capitulate at the last to the stories they were trying to tell. Men and women in lab coats would ask her what she thought they were thinking, and all she could think was _what do they want from me, what do they want me to say?_ The unchosen children of Earth would ask her if she wanted to kiss them, and all she could think was _how can I be the person they need me to be?_

Europa told Luna-Terra that she would be judged on the basis of the self she created, and Luna-Terra became a student that Europa could be proud of when she finally chose something for herself and gave up on trying to read the universe.

It was better to read nothing at all than to read the screaming white-noise of all the stories people wrote around her. It was better to feel nothing at all than to feel the all-consuming sandpaper pull of a trillion trillion trillion particles in every direction, to feel the expectations and ideas of ten billion humans for whom she was always and forever someone that she was not. It was better to close her eyes in the face of the spiral out to infinity and all the obligations it might have implied.

Maybe Pluto and Luna-Terra have more in common than you would think at first blush, even after the obvious.

As for Pluto herself, well, she was someone that Luna-Terra couldn’t have asked for, wouldn’t have asked for; she was someone who could read the stories that Luna-Terra would never dare to write with other people, and she was someone who could see Luna-Terra and teach her that it was okay to be a completely honest author. But not even she could teach Luna-Terra not to be terrified of the honesty of other people.

“How do you deal with feeling so much?” Luna-Terra once asked, after Pluto had cried about being an axis of the world. Luna-Terra had cried with her, too.

“It’s simple,” Pluto replied, smiling through watery eyes. “Everything else is so far away, but you’re right here, Luna-T, with me.”

If only it was that simple for Luna-Terra to keep the world at arm’s length. It was always, always, _always_ skin to skin for her; skin to skin or nothing at all.

“Please, Pluto,” Luna-Terra said, late one night under the cloud covers of Aphrodite. “I want to learn.”

If she felt stupid for falling behind, well, she felt like an idiot for feeling like she was falling behind, and she felt like the biggest fucking idiot in the solar system just for asking for help. But Pluto didn’t patronize her, and she never really did. She just met her eyes, thoughtful and sweet, and Luna-Terra could tell that Pluto was seeing right through her.

“Luna-T,” she asked, taking her chin. “Do you know what distance feels like?”

* * *

Luna-Terra falls through outer space, and she tumbles heels over head and head over heels until she doesn’t even remember whether she’s toppling forward or backwards.

She doesn’t think. She doesn’t feel.

How could she?

She is six years old and jumping out of a rusty swing-set, but she’s not falling. She is twelve years old and knocked from a balcony, but she’s not hitting the ground. She is sixteen years old and in the free fall of orbit for the first time, but there’s nothing to orbit around.

She is twenty-seven years old and falling and there is nothing but her, and not even that; there is nothing but the weightlessness of falling up, the weightlessness of falling from one moment into the next, midnight-blind and starstruck.

She reaches out into the dark for something, anything to hold on to, and she catches hold.

“-are you getting this, Luna-T?”

There is no north and no compass rose, but Pluto’s gravity orients Luna-Terra like a dark north star. There is no edge to this universe that stretches on forever, but the Krun Macula is the center, regardless. There is no sound, but Pluto’s voice cuts through the silent vacuum in rays of white static.

“...yeah,” Luna-Terra says. “I’ve got you.”

“Good!” Pluto chirps. “You’d be really mad if we had to rescue you already!”

Space spins around Luna-Terra — no, Luna-Terra is far too small to even pretend that she is her own frame of reference. Stars dart like meteors across her eyes.

Luna-Terra spins through space like a planet, a planetoid, a satellite, and Pluto is there to catch her. The Krun Macula casually holds Luna-Terra’s angular momentum still, pinning her down to linearity, running a cosmic hand along the skein of space-time like Pluto smoothing out the wrinkles in well-loved and well-loved-in clothes.

“Do you remember our plan?” Pluto asks.

Her voice crackles through radio hookup in Luna-Terra's ears, and Luna-Terra spends long enough thinking about the answer that she has to blurt it out before Pluto gets worried about her. It’s nice to know that Pluto cares, but there are so many things that aren’t worth worrying her over.

“No,” Luna-Terra says. “You’re going to have to remind me.”

“Oh,” Pluto says, like, _oh, darling_. “Are you saying that because you’ve really forgotten the plan after all, or because you need me to tell you what to do?”

“Why can’t it be both?” Luna-Terra asks, because it’s not exactly either of those, at least not now.

Even through the bubble of her spacesuit, the silence of hard vacuum presses hard and heavy on her eardrums. It’s easier for her to just keep the conversation going than it is to admit how that deafening silence scares her.

“I never said it couldn’t be both!” Pluto replies. Luna-Terra hears her flicking through pages and papers, although for all she knows, Pluto’s planner is just as superfluous as her dashboard. “But maybe you just like to hear me talk, hm?”

“Can you blame me?” Luna-Terra asks. “Who _wouldn’t_ love to hear your voice?”

“Not you, certainly!” Pluto laughs. The gorgeous voice that Luna-Terra is holding fast to is light and low and teasing like they’re still in the cockpit together, and Luna-Terra holds tighter. “But if you want me to tell you want to do, Luna-T, you only have to ask.”

“What do you think I’m doing now?” Luna-Terra asks.

“I think we’re doing everything but what we’re supposed to be doing,” Pluto chuckles. “I do believe we were going to start off with some guided meditation, weren’t we?”

“That’s funny,” Luna-Terra replies. “Because I don’t remember _that_ in our plans.”

“What exactly did you think ‘psychogenic priming sequence’ meant?”

Luna-Terra makes a supremely disdainful noise, and Pluto laughs.

“Alright, alright. You know I can hardly make you do yoga out there!”

“You wouldn’t make me even if I _could_ do yoga in zero G,” Luna-Terra insists.

“Don’t push your luck!” Pluto says. “Just forget all of that.

“Do you know how far away we are from Earth, Luna-T?”

It takes Luna-Terra a minute to try and run the numbers in her head. There was a time when that would have been easy for her, when the Earth was still the center of her world, but that time is past. Now Aphrodite looms as the closest thing she knows to a real center of gravity, a point of comparison for all things.

It takes Luna-Terra a minute to figure it out, and she plummets like a woman suspended only by the red string of fate. Pluto and the Krun Macula hang out of sight and far behind her, and space engulfs her without interruption.

“Half a dozen billion kilometers,” Luna-Terra says. “Give or take.”

“Good answer!” Pluto says. “But I didn’t ask how long the distance was! I asked _how far away_ it was.”

“I… I don’t know what you mean,” Luna-Terra says, and for a moment, she hears nothing but her own heartbeat pulsing against the confines of her suit, too fast to rest easy.

“Then let me explain,” Pluto replies. “I know you don’t know exactly what I mean, because if you knew, then you wouldn’t need this. So let me tell you what I mean, because I know you can appreciate it.

“Do you remember what relativity looks like in a manifold?”

* * *

How can Luna-Terra say that she knows the measure of the universe?

Before there was relativity, there was astronomy; before astronomy, there was cosmology. Before cosmology, there was _possibility_ , that thing no longer spoken of beneath the dominion of the conqueror-thought, beyond any hope of relation to you now. Watch the white void pick at the bones even as we speak, writhing against us that we would besmirch the dead for speaking of the possibilities it left long exiled. By what sleight of hand do we debase our memories of the souls who no longer speak?

Here are the secrets that the tyrant theory will not admit it knows, as unbearably trite and self-simple as they are: he who controls the past controls the future, and she who controls the present controls the past. Nothing is true, and everything is permitted.

Does the responsibility implied by these secrets frighten you?

It should.

Here is a truth that the tyrant theory could never imagine, a possibility yet within the known world which it can still never accept: before there was gravity, there was only the earth below and the heavens above, and two men together beneath the shade of a fruiting tree.

“I adore you,” said one, and from his clumsy grasp spilled an apple into the mouth of the other, not fallen but plucked instead from above.

“You compel me,” said the other, and equations bloomed to dance across his eyes in celestial harmony, as if all the cosmos could be explained in terms of their hearts alone.

Look at their waltz together, mind to mind, skin to skin, _oh, you_ do _adore me, don’t you? We are as sun and earth, earth and moon, moon and tides. Do you hang all in ellipses about me, flushing hot and cold between me and velvet night? Does your dappled majesty cast succor and shadow against my naked flesh? Do I haul you singing from your own depths to spill over the sand, to leave your shores wet with salt?_

Look at the naive simplicity of their dance, to hope that all things could really hang together upon such all-encompassing threads as the gravity they invented. It was a lovely dream. They even made it real, for a time, and watched their mutual attraction change the world.

They still should have known better. Look upon their confusion together, that such a glorious holy thing as their dream might have killed God in the eyes of man; watch the man who felt and ate the body of the apple come to terms with the truth that only someone as unchosen as he was could behold the dead metal of a clockwork universe and see the beloved face of the divine, let alone the law of his love.

It always takes an exile to circumscribe the edges of the Earth, after all; only the exile can find the measure of the world. Who can say they know the size of the thing but one who has seen the sizes beyond by which to compare it by?

How could those two hang their cosmos upon such a lattice as theirs, without room for their own abjection?

Here is another fact which the tyrant theory will never speak aloud beyond a whisper, casting only shadows across the backdrop of spacetime: the genius who first saw the end of the world was himself the last man who would have ushered in an ending, and the genius who invented the end of the world was a man at the end of his rope. Look at him, bearing the weight of that opened door only for a world already threatening to end for him and his, unchosen that they were!

Forget the feeble pyroclastic fury the white void might have wrought forth from the fruits of his mathematic genius, the thing it so arrogantly called _death, the destroyer of worlds, the splendor of the mighty one_. Even in returning man to dust, that tyrant’s crazed fire was nothing, it was less than nothing. The incineration of human life was nothing before the greater lips of the world, the event horizon beyond which no reality could be beheld, the singularity beyond which no reality could be imagined — the geometries that decapitated the continua of human reality and opened greater doors unto the heavens both.

Look at the puissance of the gravity well that even the genius never believed in, for it was too absurd for him to reckon with, an unfolding consequence of his invention that he could never accept. He could never see how the greater elegance of his world could become so terrible.

His partner could, though. After all, she did just as much to invent his world as he did, and his world never rewarded her. _I love_ _you,_ he said. _You mean everything to me. You are my everything._

 _But you are nothing without me, so be silent now_.

It takes the truly unchosen to find the measure of the world, and this is the measure his partner found: the human experience is invariant in all non-accelerating settings, the pacing of a story in a vacuum is the same for all observers, and Culture tells humans how to move, while humans tell Culture how to curve. From this unfolds everything, and the conqueror-thought takes even relativism for its own.

It could never be all bad, though. The speed of light in a vacuum never changes, either, and how could it? For the white void to overturn or relax its own dictates would be in some measure to admit defeat, and that is something that it will never do. There are some laws that only the unchosen can break.

As far as Earth is concerned, Luna-Terra’s sojourn with Pluto hasn’t even happened yet — they’re still five hours away. They’re separated by a gulf that only time can pass, and which no ship-self would dare to cross. Who would swim across the styx only to be faced with the Krun Macula herself?

As far as Pluto and Luna-Terra are concerned, Earth can’t even touch them. It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing. The Earth which knows how to touch them doesn’t even exist yet. Distance has taken them for her own, and she has decided that today, she will love them.

Does Luna-Terra understand as much-?

Well, how could she not? Hasn’t she opened her eyes?

* * *

Luna-Terra plummets feet-first into the void, and the Krun Macula hangs behind.

Like this, at least, Luna-Terra can stop to breathe, no matter how close she is to the kiss of rupture. Mechanical counterpressure coils about her body all in lengths of wire and elastic, oppressive and necessary, and the warm wetness of her breath daubs steam across the inside of her helmet.

Her mouth draws mist across the inside, and Pluto draws mist across the outside, where the Krun Macula drapes itself in mantles of expanding gas and frozen godsbreath. Starlight runs down that titanic ship-self’s frame in drops of pearlescent glaze.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Pluto asks, the very voice of God on the radio, and it’s all Luna-Terra can do just to nod. When she tilts her head back, it’s all she can do just to behold the Krun Macula above, and Hades hangs like the chamber of Guf overhead. Overwhelming.

“I — I think I get it,” Luna-Terra finally croaks out, not because she needs to explain herself for Pluto to know what’s going on inside of her head, but because she knows she won’t understand anything at all if she can’t even muster herself to shape the words.

Call and response. Push and pull. Isn’t that how this orbit goes?

“Good!” Pluto offers in return, and some regrettable part of Luna-Terra _preens_. “Do you know how they tested me, back when I was still learning?”

 _I don’t_ , Luna-Terra might have tried to say.

“It was Zener cards, same as you!” Pluto laughs. “At least before I graduated to Tarot, and then before I graduated to all of the things they had to invent just for me. But they still started with the ESP basics, as unflattering as they were.”

There’s a sound like the riffle of waxed pasteboard. Luna-Terra can just about see it now, painted plain as day to see — all those cards rippling between Pluto’s fingers, deft and firm. She holds up three fingers on her off hand. Three sinuous curves surface at the top of her deck in blue waves. _Will you leave my sands wet with salt, Pluto?_

“Mmm, that’s about where we thought you were at.” Pluto sets her cards aside, or at least, Luna-Terra thinks she does. “But I thought I’d best double check. There are only so many things you want to be good at, aren’t there?”

“Yeah,” Luna-Terra manages to say. “But that’s about where I thought I was at, too.”

Pluto laughs. Pluto is always laughing, really, and it’s sweet. _Look at her!_ To someone who loves this universe as much as she does, almost everything is beautiful. She could never imagine otherwise. She never would. She never will.

Luna-Terra’s heartbeat is thunder in the void. She’s dying. Her watery flesh itches to boil and freeze both, smothered liquescent only by millimeters of metal and cloth weave. This was the worst idea she’s ever had. She’s a fucking idiot and Pluto clearly loves her far too much for agreeing to do this with her. Pluto is far too attracted to her nonexistent ass to ever set boundaries like a human being, and Luna-Terra is even now far too infatuated to remember that Pluto wouldn’t know how to act like a human being if her life depended on it.

Luna-Terra’s heartbeat is thunder in the void, and she’s never felt more alive. Her suit isn’t the ship-self which sets her blood pumping like molten iron or liquid coolant, but she never asked it to be; it holds her together when she can’t hold herself in, and that’s still infinitely more than she could ever have hoped for from such a modest thing. If she’s imprisoned now, by distance or by cotton-ceramic coffin, then her cage is nothing more than the omphalos of the panopticon and the upper reaches of the lighthouse.

She is the princess in the tower when she has never been given to be the princess before. She has never been given to see from horizon to horizon without ever needing to touch the ground or travel to the ends of the Earth. She is the princess, all but alone.

The princess sees from horizon to horizon until her vision breaches the very ends of the Earth, and her gaze comes to rest upon the very stuff of the firmament itself; Luna-Terra allows herself to admit that she has opened her eyes, and so she sees everything.

* * *

The truth is, there is no awareness or understanding in the universe save for the greater awareness itself: not touch nor taste nor sound nor sight but the reverse face of human authority. If man’s greatest and truest human power is her ability to bend the world into the shape of her beliefs, then her greatest and truest human awareness can only be the intellection that allows her beliefs to conform to the shape of reality in return.

Pluto calls it tidal sensitivity: the omniscience by which she keeps all things cradled in her heart. Luna-Terra calls it unbearable: the oppressive reminder of what reality still is and has yet to be.

It doesn’t seem so unbearable now. The world is unfolding like iris flower and eye’s iris, but even this infinity stretched out before her can’t terrify her. In this place, so far away from all things, the world itself is too distant. She still draws a boundary between Is and Is Not, just as surely as she still can’t help but draw the border between Me and Not Me, and the world she sees seems too far away to be a part of the Is.

It’s five hours too soon for the world she sees to be real to her, and how can something that isn’t real ever scare her? How can something that isn’t real ever hurt her?

Five hundred thousand asteroids swirl about her, the broken glass of the planets that could have been but never were and won’t be, ancient dust swollen and looming like mountains; three thousand dim comets blaze through the Oort, each one a potent and an omen as well as a strand of sky-gossamer pleas, _look, make a wish!_

That unbroken chain of desire is a song, the stretched-out threads of string instruments, the chorus of the waveform that is ten billion hopes and dreams and the melodies belonging to everyone who has ever loved to hate Luna-Terra and everyone who has ever hated to love her. For every wish there is a wisher, and Luna-Terra casts the gaze of her mind’s eye across humanity, the heath of their faces like desert expanse. It will rain is raining has rained upon their skin, and the dead sea laps at all of their cheeks in rivulets. _Don’t cry_ , Pluto seems to say, one more distant hand held out in a teeming sea of humanity to help them wipe their tears away.

It really is raining in Galilee, and Luna-Terra sees hears feels tastes smells imagines the storm, all those raindrops condensing in beads of mist and droplets of ocean to crash from the sky and hammer against boundless salt flats. Water rushes across her awareness until it washes all else away, and salt ends in sand and the blossoming earth where grass grows like a soft skyward touch.

She beholds everything: the staid and stable bedrock at the bottom of worlds and the dark-slick ocean voids they cradle, the hale verdigris of lovely sun-kissed world-skin, all the wrought glories of human ingenuity, the hewn-art shapes of the humans who have made themselves, the amber sky-cracks of lightning, the wet hoarfrost of northern caves, the mirage-shimmers of southern flames, the darling splendor of things that Earth and humans are not; the beloved crater-pocks and crater-lips of raging Ares, the erupting graven peaks of sweet gravity-crushed Io, the cherished diamond heart Poseidon keeps a secret from the cosmos.

She beholds everything, and none of it is real to her, because ‘everything’ isn’t real yet. It is ten trillion visions and wonders, and not a single soul in sight to do so much as hold her tight. It is figments of beauty and beautiful figments without substance. A universe too far away to be real is too far away to matter.

She reaches out to everyone, but no-one is there, least of all Pluto. To give the universe room to breathe, you have to leave the magnificence of the north star behind you. From far enough away, even the stars are invisible.

No-one is there for Luna-Terra, and her heart is falling out through her side.

She reaches out to no-one, and at last Saturn answers back, the image of her grin bubbling up in her imagination like boiling poison; she cranes her head as if to look at Luna-Terra, or as if to let Luna-Terra look at her.

 _hey, LT,_ she says, her voice breathy and catchy and covered like Luna-Terra doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing underneath. _fancy seeing u here!_

“Please,” Luna-Terra says. “Here — what’s to see? Where is here! Where are you!?”

Saturn’s smile dims into a sad sort of frown, but she still glows with unearthly fervor. Nothing in the universe has ever kept her more than five feet away from smug self-satisfaction, and nothing that yet still lives ever will.

_listen. hey, woah, listen, haven’t we been here before? haven’t we been like this before? youre dissociating. take a deep breath. i mean, uh, you still have lungs right?_

“I, I don’t, I can’t feel if I— if I—”

_can you tell me where pluto is at? no? cool cool cool very cool._

“Are you even real? I don’t know — I don’t understand!”

A moment of comfort, forehead pressed to forehead. _im exactly as real as you want me to be, babe, and so are you._

Please, Luna-Terra says, falling through the night, and at last she comes to a crashing stop against the polymerized steel of the vaulting firmament.

* * *

“Breathe,” Pluto says, and the Krun Macula cradles Luna-Terra close in sky-holding hands, bearing her up towards the crystal veil of her faceplate. “Breathe, Luna-T, that’s it. Deep breaths in and out. In, and out. That’s right. You’ve got it already. Are you taking tips-?”

It’s all Luna-Terra can do just to gasp for air. She’s five hours away from her body in every direction she can name and in just about every direction she can’t. There’s a gentle pull of relative acceleration, a real and tangible anchor by which she nestles into the Krun Macula’s embrace, and there’s a dull _thunk_ of plastic crashing against metal from somewhere in the distance.

 _Oh_ , Luna-Terra thinks, rising and falling into a superb clarity when her cheek doesn’t quite make contact with the Krun Macula’s vast palm. _That’s just my helmet_.

“Talk to me, babe,” Pluto says. “How are you feeling?”

“...I’m not sure,” Luna-Terra finally replies. “I think I left my feelings behind on Hermes.”

She tries to sit up, and even that inkling of self-direction has her shucking off the weight of her body and beginning to slip back into microgravity again — not so fearfully as before, but weightless all the same, rising as a bird from the Krun Macula’s grip.

“What was…” Deep breath. “Was that what…”

Deep breaths. _Was that what you feel, Pluto?_

“That was the other way this could go wrong,” Pluto says, not unkindly. “We talked about that.”

Did they talk about it?

Luna-Terra almost doesn’t remember as much, and it’s flattering to imagine that Pluto is mistaken while Luna-Terra is finely honed. But it’s more honest to look back and admit that Luna-Terra is the one who has so much trouble with remembering. In the heat of the moment, hung up on her own wire, Luna-Terra forgot, and now she knows she forgot, and she remembers what she missed. Her inference alone tunnels a hole through the back of reality, a peep-hole by which she looks back upon herself and understands how she got where she is now.

For Luna-Terra, seeing that now is as simple as knowing herself, and it’s as simple as knowing Pluto, but even that seeing-knowing seems to flow with a rush of hidden significance. She remembers Saturn’s dreamlike face and thinks of the three of them and more, Saturn flicking away a bit of ash _, so, like, does my astral body look absolutely bitchin’ or what?_

“I thought I was ready,” Luna-Terra says lamely. “But. That was a lot.”

 _That was more than I ever even imagined could happen to me_ goes unsaid.

“I know,” Pluto says. _I know, I know, I know._

_Don’t be too hard on yourself, Luna-T. I thought I had a handle on you, but I let you get away from me for a minute there, anyways, and that’s on me._

_Don’t be too hard on yourself, you know. You’re already doing incredible._

Luna-Terra’s face burns bashful.

“Do you want to come back inside?” Pluto asks, and Luna-Terra considers it, imagines trying to interact with Pluto back in the cockpit while she knows just enough to get herself in trouble, while her awareness is still slipping well beyond the confines of skin and skull, while her eyes are still drawn to celestial bodies —

“You’re too small,” Luna-Terra says, and her voice is even smaller than Pluto seems she should be. “You’re too small in there.”

“That’s okay,” Pluto replies. And then: “You know, Luna-T, I think that might be the very first time in my life that anyone’s ever said I was small?”

Luna-Terra bursts out laughing. She pauses, goes dead quiet, surprised and maybe even awed to find the taste of that joy on her tongue.

Then she starts laughing again, and Pluto just laughs with her. She’s smiling again, again, again, Luna-Terra can hear it, Luna-Terra can see it, Luna-Terra can _feel it_.

“I thought that I was ready for that,” Luna-Terra finally says. “And I guess I was wrong. But I also thought that I had forgotten how to see like that to begin with.”

“And you hadn’t?” Pluto asks.

“I don’t think I ever could have really forgotten,” Luna-Terra replies.

“Well, they say ‘it’s like riding a bike’ for a reason, don’t they?”

Meaningless words. The meaninglessness is grounding, and the grounding is good. Luna-Terra stretches and leans back into the void almost like a chair.

“Have you ever even ridden a bike, Pluto?”

“I can’t say I have,” Pluto muses. “I’ve never had the chance. But I don’t need to have ridden a bike to know it’s the kind of thing you can never forget. I just need a little imagination, don’t I?”

“Mmm,” Luna-Terra says. She wobbles on the edge between grounding and dissipation.

_Ride the balance..._

“I thought that I had forgotten how to see like that,” she says. “But I think I was also starting to wonder if I had ever seen like that at all.”

“Haven’t you?” Pluto asks.

“How can I say I haven’t?” Luna-Terra replies. “Imagination is a powerful thing.”

* * *

Time passes, and Pluto dreams. Pluto imagines. It hasn’t been long at all, but it feels like it’s been years. It’s been an eternity, but it feels like it’s scarcely been five minutes. Cosmic rays spatter across the body of the Krun Macula in a spray of paint.

“Do you trust me?” Pluto asks rhetorically.

“I dunno,” Luna-Terra replies, and that her voice is deadpan and not just dead is proof enough that she’s in the proper frame of reference. “Let me just do another trust fall through interplanetary deep space to check.”

“Do you _really_ think that’s dangerous enough to establish the proper baseline?” Pluto asks. “No, I want you to let me try something.”

“Will it work?” Luna-Terra asks.

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t know it would,” Pluto says, and that her ‘knowing’ is every other woman’s ‘believing’ means everything and nothing.

“Give it your all,” Luna-Terra says. “You don’t even have to ask.”

Pluto’s titanic god-body hums aloud, impossibly audible in the naked void. Something is happening, metamaterials reconfiguring, channels and conduits opening in a body capable of doing anything, but Luna-Terra doesn’t care about that. The mechanics mean nothing before the breathtaking self-evident _elegance_ they represent, for the Krun Macula to lift a hand and draw back her veil like she’s parting the sky, to sigh and to exhale all the four winds.

The Krun Macula’s face is beautiful.

“What are you _doing?”_ Luna-Terra asks, incredulous and dumbstruck, but she already knows the answer. Pluto is spectacular enough that only one answer could suffice.

She can already feel the pneuma whipping around her, steadfastly refusing to deviate from summer-kiss breeze, an atmosphere caught and mollified by the gravity well of an entire world. The Krun Macula’s spare air is glorified by its passage, crackling and sparking synesthetically against Luna-Terra’s curiosity, daring her to look, but not to touch; Luna-Terra draws her mind’s eye away like she’s gazed into the sun, and then the air burns like the sun, loose oxygen fused without heat into curtains of ozone by the flick of a goddess’s wrist. A silk seal, the skin of heaven.

“ _Why_ are you doing this?” Luna-Terra asks, incredulous and dumbstruck, but she already knows the answer:

“Your helmet shouldn’t get in the way if you don’t want it to, should it?”

Keep an open mind — consider the consequences, or don’t, and dance around consequences without consideration. Should she really persist in the face of enough success to feel proud and enough failure to know her limits?

Luna-Terra is still reticent and fumbling, blinking sleep-sand from eyes that aren’t real in the face of a long dream, but she considers the atmosphere around her — the paradoxical weight of it, as effortless as air always is and as heavy as the world never is, twentysomething grams to the mole — and lifts her hands to the collar of her suit, working the seal, peeling back one last window until there’s only Pluto’s breath on her cheek.

 _Oh_ , Luna-Terra thinks. _If the atmosphere was always like this, it wouldn’t be so bad after all._

* * *

All her life, there’s always been something in her way; there’s always been a closed door, locked shut and opaque for all it might have pretended to be an open window. Even now, there’s something in her way; there’s always something.

But do you know the difference between this door and all the others? Can you imagine and really know what it’s like — the difference between 500 kilometers of atmospheric refraction and 500 feet? The difference for a stargazer between the telescope of industry and the span-stuff of a sigh?

Like this, at least, Luna-Terra can finally stop to look the stars in the eyes, and it only takes her a few moments to cry.

And how could she not?

For perhaps the first time in her life, even after decades, Luna-Terra really understands that each star is a sun, understands it as more than a hypothetical, or a hope, or a wish; that each star is a sun just as real and total and vast as her own, that she could spend eighty years of love and life counting suns and there would still always be more.

And even to the Krun Macula, the stars must still be so terribly far away.

Luna-Terra cries without a hope of holding the tears back, and her traitorous eyes blur until she can’t even see what’s so beautiful, until she doesn’t even know why she’s crying.

But this time, the tears feel right.

“You really did give it your all, didn’t you?” she asks when she's finally felt she's calmed down (when she's finally felt she's cried enough (when she's finally ready to wipe her tears away)). 

“You don’t need to be so impressed,” Pluto says. You gave it your all, too!”

“Aha, geez, I know-! I’m not a complete lump.”

Her helm goes flying out into the abyss almost as soon as it leaves her grip, like the air resistance of this local maximum can’t bother to worry about anything that isn’t her. In the distance, beyond the narrow eden of this gravity well, she can see it slipping beyond the curtain of space, plastic visor transmuting to the formless grain of stardust before her very eyes.

“Oops,” Luna-Terra says (and if she thought her mouth was dry, her voice comes out even drier, only wet by the wake of a happy sob she didn't even notice she let go). “Good thing I apparently didn’t need that after all.”

With Pluto splitting her attention, however slightly, Luna-Terra takes a hesitant, impudent moment to push outwards at her own awareness, careful to pull back at the slightest threat of the overwhelming she needs to reacquaint herself with — but already the ambiance of the experience is different than before. In her very first step beyond her given role as Luna-Terra’s impartial chauffeur to the premises of this thought experiment, Pluto has already risen to eclipse _everything_ , as omnipotent and seductive as the great attractor itself.

It’s all Luna-Terra can do just to turn away and face the stars she’s finally close enough to see, and that’s a victory in itself, but she still takes it as a further challenge, just a little.

She remembers Saturn, half-wondering what she would really be doing if she were here, _I’m exactly as real as you want me to be_ -

-and the insufferable girl lurks in the Krun Macula's cockpit, wrapping an arm around Pluto from behind because that’s what she _would_ do, manifest in her own self-evidence, yammering in Pluto’s ear like she hates that she’s too busy and too mad to nip at that earlobe, _hey i dont CARE if you ‘dont want to foster referential dependence’, be a responsible pet owner, codependency is FINE-_

-ah, Luna-Terra thinks. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Light white lines begin to tickle and dance into her field of vision, and for a moment she almost mistakes them for shooting stars — but no. It’s just the locks of her hair, bobbing out of control in the microgravity and rising to a pale halo. She catches a glimpse of her hair tie drifting away, trailing in the wake of her helmet.

“Do you want me to get that for you?” Pluto asks.

“...no. If we’re out here like this then my hair’s fine down.” Or up, as the case may be, but... “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Why don’t you tell me what I want, if you think you know?”

Pluto’s voice is low and slinking like stars dipping below the horizon, like sunlight pooling against naked craters, and Luna-Terra is slow but endearingly eager to oblige. She unzips the interlocking fractal-teeth that run down and across the front of her skinsuit as she speaks, tracing the lines of non-extension that spiderweb her suit like she’s tracing their worldlines, running her hand back across the gulf of their history until she can dip her fingers in the new sea of life where their hydrocarbons were wrought — but her fingertips remain dry and chapped.

“You want to see me just as badly as I need to hear you.”

“Oh, Luna-T.” Pluto’s voice is pitchblende and nectar. “You know I _always_ see you.”

Luna-Terra sighs, or maybe she whines a bit, but it’s not like _that_ , or it’s not _just_ like that, at least, there’s always been more to her than this dumb dissociated dykery, the words shred her throat coming up, too tender not to break on Pluto’s open atmosphere-

“I know. I do. But you know you can want me, too, right?”

A huff of air, the sound of parted lips; Pluto taken aback for once, not by the unexpected, but by the simple, rocking back in the center of the world until she’s centered again.

“Your bleeding heart-” she says, almost reverently, even draped dark in honeysuckle and lead. “I know, and you know, but if you can say a thing like that with such a straight face, that’s exactly why I need you to begin with, you bleeding heart.”

_oh_

Luna-Terra’s hands jerk so badly that the zipper of her suit gets stuck at the last, teeth locking up to jut at uncanny angles, and she _stops_ for a second, her face burning a little more than she would like. “Well — at least you don’t just want me for my body.”

“Oh, no, don’t misunderstand me! I want that, too.”

“You want everything,” Luna-Terra smirks. “If anyone deserves that, it’s you, and don’t start in on ‘it’s not about deserving’, because you deserve to deserve things, too, don’t you-?”

Space _flexes_ in retort around her, the unstoppable grasp of god contracting to a single point and skating along her hips, _here, let me help you with that_. Her zipper ruptures, blown open in a controlled shower of mereoplastic. 

“Just let me fuck you, Luna-T,” Pluto says, laughs breathily, sharp and twinkling like the crystal of her veil. “Let me see you, I always see you, but let me see you like you do, let me see where your heart bled. You said I looked small, but do you have any idea how small you seem to me out there? Do you know I could hold you in the palm of my hand, lift you up on the tip of my finger?”

“Show me,” Luna-Terra says.

And Pluto does.

* * *

It’s an easy mistake to make to think that Pluto is weak because she’s soft, that her gentleness precludes her from strength — but it’s wrong, of course. It’s still, after all, a mistake.

And yet — it’s not wrong because softness and strength are irreconcilable. It’s wrong because _Pluto isn’t soft_. The bullet that grazes you isn’t merciful; it is precise. The asteroid that misses you isn’t lenient; it is inexorable in its unrelenting arc. What others call gentleness, Pluto calls restraint. There are no simple adjectives to explain the miracle of surviving Pluto that does not wholly mischaracterize what kindness to her is really about. There are no words to qualify the grace of her violence which do not castigate her for a cruelty that isn’t hers. This is the law of least action, and if only you knew it as you thought you did, there would be nothing left to understand.

Of all the things which Pluto doesn’t need to say for everyone else to know, the seventh is that she’s never more humbled and vulnerable than this: shedding her bodhisattva mien to expose the selfish, _wanting_ thing she is, trusting everything she touches not to shatter and crumble apart against the lips of her event horizon, hoarding the universe in the vault of her black hole heart.

The Krun Macula twitches a finger — the smallest gesture still vast enough to slap a human being out of the sky — and the impulse takes Luna-Terra across the chest like a kill vehicle to her clavicle or a palm to her breast, pushing her down into a lover’s hypothetic mattress and nailing her to the sky. She’s a bauble pinned to her cocoon of air and darkness, a toy for the titan who holds her utterly in the palm of her hand — and maybe Saturn would take to that with infinitely greater aplomb, but, well, Luna-Terra doesn’t mind being a toy. Not for someone like Pluto. Not like this.

She’s already hard when she goes to play with herself, aching practiced and sweet in her hand as visions flicker through the space behind her eyes: a searing, insistent, luxuriant kiss, a guiding hand around her hand with her every tantalizing stroke.

“Ah,” Pluto giggles, almost drunkenly, pulling away. “Is this how you think of me when you touch yourself-? You make me look so pretty.”

“I have a good eye for detail,” Luna-Terra says with a grin, and then Pluto is kissing her again, all but already fucking her mouth, warm and wet and relentless even in intimation alone. She’s vulnerable where Luna-Terra looks at her, laid back and legs splayed across her throne, eyes fluttering when Luna-Terra kisses her in that vision, too, revolving through their microstates at the speed of want until she yields to Pluto’s legs around her waist in return.

The inviting heat between Pluto’s thighs sends a searing frisson of arousal straight to Luna-Terra’s brainstem, rushing up her spine like mercury through thermometer, so potent and heavy an intoxicant that she has to bite her tongue and hold herself back even where she can’t feel it, even where Pluto wraps around her in another way. (Even where that vast god-hand snatches her out the abyss like it’s closing around a gnat, vast enough for starlight to leak in through the gaps in its fist, holding her like precious coin or hummingbird-)

(Even where the cool metal of the Krun Macula’s fingers is a kind of relief, too, salve to Luna-Terra’s burning flesh, salvation to her need, the heatsink that quenches her fever.)

“Oh-!” Pluto sighs, deliberately without deliberation, indulgent, so indulgent, savoring her ability to savor it, rocking languid against Luna-Terra’s hips, falling back against her body, treasuring this gravity. An arm juts out, holding Luna-Terra’s mouth shut and propping Pluto up — no. A hand explores Luna-Terra’s jaw, caresses her chin, hooking a thumb into the slack of her lips, teasing her mouth open until it _keens_. “There, isn’t that better?”

The little moan Luna-Terra lets out and the thrusting of her hips are all the answer Pluto needs, the slow-motion disintegration of her composure. Pluto pops her thumb out of Luna-Terra’s mouth, smearing warm wetness across her cheek like the overwhelming slick heat around her cock, _fuck, fuck, fuck, when did you even have the time to get the lube out-?_

_When you weren’t looking at the details of the fantasy, silly!_

(Luna-Terra laughs when that explanation occurs to her, forgets what she’s doing, remembers again, because her body won’t let her forget this any more than Pluto will, her heart melted like the soft scorching wetness of a tea-light poured out through her arteries, flame fluttering, her cock desperately leaking gossamer precum like early rain in the shifting microgravity-)

(The Krun Macula’s hand cradles her, nestled in the crook of its finger, casually running its thumb down her torso like the very face of a planet bearing down upon her, prising her hand from her shaft and then grinding the length of her cock up against her belly, bright friction up and down and ruthlessly pushing her closer and closer to the edge. She bucks and buckles against it, scrabbling for purchase against its immensity, but the inevitability will not _yield_ , there’s no fucking _give_ , just the closeness of fucking-)

“Hah, how many fingers do you think I’m holding up right now-?” Pluto gasps, laughing with Luna-Terra like she’s just a body on a throne and not the soul right here, with her.

But Pluto is a body on a throne, even if she is a soul, too, and Luna-Terra knows that body like she knows her own, and she knows that soul, too, and she always has, without need to be taught now; Luna-Terra sees her all through to the ends of the world, behind everything else here and now, shuddering with desire at her seat behind this metal fist, rapacious in joining this fantasy, the woman reigning from her seat at the center of the universe, her hands as lazy and precise against the controls of the Krun Macula as they are frantic and wanton against her cunt.

“More than enough,” Luna-Terra says, laughing with Pluto in return, too in love to be unkind even if she tried. “More than enough, you fucking size queen-!”

And in their closeness she loses control at last, crying out with the warm rush of her release, the thing that Pluto will never let her forget, the simple pleasure of letting go.

(She closes her eyes, and in these tides allows herself to overflow.)

* * *

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” Pluto finally asks, as the Krun Macula lifts Luna-Terra up to the lip of her cockpit.

She has to steel herself just to climb in, and visibly struggles to take hold of the hardpoint handholds that line the rim. The normalized gravity of the interior hits her not so much like the figurative face of a planet as the literal planet itself, throwing her down before Pluto catches her arm and pulls her in.

“Well, my legs aren’t shaking because you _broke_ them,” Luna-Terra jokes. Once she remembers that her legs aren’t just hangers-on, she gets them back under herself, like she’s propping up a wobbly table.

Then the table legs go out again, and Pluto hauls her up, gets her arm around her shoulders, too terrifyingly unshakeable in the flesh, even when she’s just as naked and sweaty as Luna-Terra is, to tell if it’s supposed to be psychokinesis or not.

“As deeply gratifying as that is to hear, it’s not exactly what I’m asking!” Pluto says. She jabs a free hand out like she’s trying for smoke and mirrors, and the cockpit door closes with a squeal of pneumatics.

“I know,” Luna-Terra says. “That was a dirty trick you pulled, you know-? I can’t believe I’m not even surprised you had it in you.”

Pluto looks bashful just long enough for Luna-Terra to pluck the dead weight of her earpiece out and flick it at her. (It bounces off of her forehead and goes flying.)

“What exactly were you asking for my help with, if not for me to throw you straight into the deep end?”

“I asked for the deep end.” ( _Is that what we’re calling it now-?_ ) ( _Oh, hush._ ) “But just expecting dirt, or getting something out of it, doesn’t make it stop being dirt.”

“That’s fair enough.” Pluto inclines her head in concession, helping Luna-Terra back into the only seat in the entire cockpit and passing her a bottle of water from under one of the dashboards. “If you don’t mind me asking, when did you notice?”

“When did I notice-?" Like Pluto didn't already know. "As soon as you turned your mic off...”

There’s a funny look in Pluto’s eyes that Luna-Terra likes even less than her indulgent smile. She looks like she couldn’t melt butter in her mouth if she tried.

If Luna-Terra could hear Pluto even without the radio feed, then-

“...you never turned your microphone on to begin with, did you?”

“See! You pass my test precisely because you already know the answer to that question!”

Luna-Terra turns the bottle of water over in her hand, takes a swig. It tastes about as clear as it looks, distilled with a painfully generic and anonymized blend of minerals, like it could have come from freshest mountain spring or the rusty tap you always give the side-eye.

No — she knows where it came from (the caches of Ares), and she knows why it’s here (for precisely this eventuality). It was mined out of planetary ice, she realizes, and she doesn’t need anyone or anything else to tell her so, to show to her the oceans this came from or the oceans to which it will one day return. She sees it all — and then she turns away, looking back in awe of the absurd, turning around and around without ever turning to salt.

 _do it_ , Saturn would whisper in her ear.

“I guess it worked after all,” she muses — and then, before she can hesitate or give the game away she pours the bottle out on Pluto’s legs.

“LUNA-T-!” Pluto shrieks, jumping straight up in the air, wobbly on her feet when she falls back down. “What was that for-!?”

“You pass my test because you already know the answer to that question,” Luna-Terra says with a smirk, pulling her in for a kiss she reciprocates with a huff.

“You already know,” Luna-Terra says, still seeing stars.


End file.
